the value of things

Poet number 7 of 8, in my current Scottish-poetry theme, and today it's a verse from Robert Garioch ...

... I don't actually have a specific volume of Garioch's poetry, so this one is taken from within the pictured 1992 collection:

 
Property
 
A man should have no thought for property,
he said, and drank down his pint.
Mirage is found in the Desert and elsewhere.
Later, in Libya (sand and scrub,
the sun two weeks to midsummer)
he carried all his property over the sand:
socks, knife and spoon, a dixie,
toilet kit, the Works of Shakespeare,
blanket, groundsheet, greatcoat,
and a water-bottle holding no more water.
He walked with other scorched men
in the dryness of this littoral waste land,
a raised beach without even sea water
with a much damned escarpment
unchanged throughout a day’s truck-bumping
or a lifetime of walking without water,
confirming our worst fears of eternity.
Two men only went on whistling,
skidding on a beat-frequency.
Tenderness to music’s dissonances,
and much experience of distress in art
was distressed, this time, in life.
A hot dry wind rose, moving the sand,
the sand-shifting Khamsin, rustling over
the land, whistling through hardy sandy
scrub, where sand-snails’ brittle
shells on the sand, things in themselves,
roll for ever. Suffusing the sand in the
air, the sun burned in darkness.
No man now whistled, only the sandy wind.
The greatcoat first, then blanket discarded
and the other property lay absurd on the Desert,
but he kept his water-bottle.
In February, in a cold wet climate,
he has permanent damp in his bones
for lack of that groundsheet.
He has a different notion of the value of things.
 
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Robert Garioch (1909 – 1981)
 
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